A Post-it world

At three a.m., note-taking can be particularly tedious process - especially when it means that my dorm desk looks as if it's an art project gone awry. I can hardly move my arm without dislodging any of a hundred and one things that have taken over the 60" x 24" processed wood estate.

Codals and commentaries vye for space with scissors, transparent tape, pens & pencils, rulers, erasers, diskettes, stacks of bar review materials, a half-dozen highlighters, a mouse, a keyboard, acomputer monitor and a printer. Add to the mess a cup for milk, my polvoron container, a perfume spray, three hybrid ponkans, my cellphone and my watch. And lest I forget, the nth generation of post-its in and flaguettes to grace my study area since the bar review began.

As I stared down at the mess in front of me, the kind of which I never had any problems with as an ordinary law student, it occurred to me that never before in my whole academic life had I been such a devoted consumer of 3M's products. Sure, I had the occasional adhesive notepad in undergrad, but one pad usually lasted me a sem. In the past few months, however, every time I enter a National Bookstore outlet, I would exit with at least two 3M products in tow.

Notes grace not only my desks at the dorm and in the Student lounge, but also have taken over my computer. When my PC is up and running, the first thing I see on the monitor are yellow electronic versions of the notepads with reminders and schedules and prayers and curses and the minutiae stuff that I absentmindedly scrawl out. The notepad god's presence cannot be denied.